An Englishman Looks at India Fifty Years After British Rule

An Englishman Looks at India Fifty Years After British Rule

Bangalore has become one of the most go-head cities in South
Asia, a hard-driving, satellite-uplinked, Intel-inside-everything,
beer drinking regional capital. But it is also a city where the
past and present mingle  and contrast  with an intensity shared
by few other places in India. So it seemed an ideal place for an
Englishman to take a look at what has happened in the 50 years
since Britain gave India its independence.

Simon Winchester, who served as a foreign correspondent in India
back in the 1970s, notes that Englishmen like to say that they came
to an India in which the people had little except poverty and
anarchy, and when they left, it had a legislature, a national
railway, courts, bureaucracies, roads and telephones, as well as
the unifying influence of the English language. But he found that
Indians have many reservations about that legacy, and many blame
Britain for a number of things  including the effect of pervasive
English on Indian culture, and the troubles of the railway system.
One great legacy, the court system, Winchester found, has
degenerated into near chaos with Dickensian delays in justice and
widespread bribery. The most remarkable legacy  and perhaps the
most valuable given the threats to order and outbursts of violence
on the subcontinent  is the Indian Army, one of the largest in the
world. Unlike the armies of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri
Lanka and Burma, Winchester notes, the Indian Army is virtually
nonpolitical.

Winchester ends his story with an extraordinary scene, the
military review called Beating Retreat. "Lining the tops of the
sandstone walls, in perfectly delineated silhouettes, stand the
desert cameleers of India's Border Security Force. The camels are
caparisoned, the soldiers' rifles are held at full salute, and they
stand silent and rock-still ... against the gold of the evening,"
while massed bands play the Mahatma Gandhi's best-loved (English)
hymn: "Change and decay in all around I see; Oh Thou who Changest
Not, Abide with Me."

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